all jews

The recent arrests of JDL members for assault and hate crimes for a brutal attack on Arab, Jewish and other protesters of AIPAC (the right-wing, pro-Zionist lobbying organization) sent me to the archives to dig up some reportage and investigation I had done for People Against Racist Terror in the 1990s about the JDL. I had been physically attacked at least twice previously by JDLers, once in Brooklyn in 1968 at a sit-in for open admissions for Black and Puerto Rican high school grads to Brooklyn College (then 99% white, mostly Jewish with a small minority of Irish Catholics). I was attacked again by the JDL at an anti-Klan rally in Los Angeles in 1983, by Irv Rubin and Earl Krugel (who pulled a shiv and shouted racist threats at Black marchers). The JDL is and always has been a stone racist, reactionary, pro-imperialist, organization, breeding ground for Meier Kahane’s genocidal Kach party in israel. I use quotes around “Defense” in the title of the article because just like the so-called Israeli “Defense” Forces, they are an aggressive, abusive bunch, and have always attacked Arabs, leftists, people of color and especially Jews who don’t buy their lies.

There is a law in Israel, passed in 1985, which forbids political parties to openly oppose the principle of a Jewish state. Neither are they allowed to work for a change of this principle through democratic means. A party so doing will be banned from elections to the Knesset. Democracy is thus denied to those citizens - even Jews - who wish to work within the parliamentary system towards replacing the Jewish state with a secular state which represents all its citizens' equal rights regardless of religion or ethnic origin.